Texel:
These are the dots that make up the texture
maps (often erroneously called bitmaps). Texture
maps scale larger or smaller depending on whether the texture mapped object
is moving nearer or further away. Thus each dot which defines a color may correspond
to the screen pixels at a ratio inferior or superior
to 1:1. For this reason, contrarily to the pixels which make up a standard bitmap,
a texel's size may be different to that of a screen pixel.
Texture:
Texture is the grain of an object, allowing
you to identify the displayed material: metal, liquid, polished, rough, veined,
etc. In 3D vocabulary, the color of the material is added to the texture, and
then texture facing links the grain of the object with its color. The resulting
color may however be other than the final color appearing on-screen since other
details, such as light effects, may also be taken into consideration.
Texture
mapping:
The superimposition of a 2D texture or pattern
over the surface of a 3D graphical object. This method is very efficient for
producing the appearance of texture.
Texture
memory:
This memory is used to store information concerning textures. Utilization
of the graphics board's memory is usually shared between textures,
Z-buffering, and two frame
buffers.
TFT (Thin Film
Transistor):
A monitor made with TFT technology is a liquid crystal display (LCD)
that has a transistor for each pixel. This means
that the current that illuminates pixels can be smaller and can thus be turned
on and off more rapidly. TFT is also referred to as active matrix technology.
TFT/LCD is currently the most popular type of flat
panel display and is widely used in notebook and laptop computers, projectors
and TVs.
3D
accelerator:
A hardware add-on board to speed up 3D performance,
and not to optimize graphics display. Basically a
3D accelerator can draw polygons using 3-dimensional vertices, and can map textures
on polygons and shade them.
Tile rendering
(or Tile based rendering):
The principle behind Tile rendering is that the display is split into small
areas called tiles that are rendered independently.
The results are impressive performance in games and a perfect image quality.
Translucency:
The quality of an object to let light pass
through it, but diffusing it so that objects on the other side cannot be clearly
distinguished. Frosted glass is translucent whereas clear glass is transparent.
Triangle
parameters (100% hardware):
When all gradient data needed for the graphics
engine is derived internally, freeing the CPU
from calculating these parameters and eliminating the need for consequent transfer.
Trilinear
filtering:
Bilinear filtering
followed by a second image filtering to eliminate imperfections and defaults
at texture intersection.
24-bit
color:
24-bit color images are made up of three 8-bit
color channels (RGB), each of which contains up to
256 colors. When all three are combined they provide up to 16 million colors
(AKA True Color).